“Columbine”

In “Columbine,” Dave Cullen takes on a complicated task: trying to understand the unexplainable. Cullen was a journalist during the 1999 Columbine High School shooting perpetrated by teens Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. TIME magazine asks, “Should this story be told at all? There’s an element of sick, voyeuristic fascination to it — we don’t need an exercise in disaster porn. But ‘Columbine’ is a necessary book.” It is necessary because it provides insight into how the news media got the story very wrong and profiled the two incorrectly. According to New York magazine, “The massacre itself lasted barely an hour, but news helicopters circled overhead with no information all day. That’s a lot of time to fill. So here came the Trench Coat Mafia, ‘She said yes,’ and jock culture, theories that were cemented in the public consciousness early on and never left.” Reporters were fed misleading information and completely failed to correct their stories afterward. The New York Times’ review highlights that the boys planted a bomb in the cafeteria, but it never went off; it could’ve easily killed 500 people, clearly showing that suicidal Klebold and calculating Harris did not care about cliques — they only wanted to destroy as many lives as possible. And no one could’ve stopped them. Harris quoted Shakespeare in a video to his parents: “Good wombs have borne bad sons.”